• Introduction

PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

• 1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution
• 2. The Way We Were
• 3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia
• 4. The Invisible Brain
• 5. War: What Is It Good For? 
• 6. The Inevitability of Agriculture 
• 7. The Age of Chiefdoms
• 8. The Second Information Revolution
• 9. Civilization and So On
• 10. Our Friends the Barbarians 
• 11. Dark Ages
• 12. The Inscrutable Orient
• 13. Modern Times
• 14. And Here We Are
• 15. New World Order
• 16. Degrees of Freedom

PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

• 17. The Cosmic Context

• 18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness

• 19. Why Life Is So Complex

• 20. The Last Adaptation

PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

• 21. Non-crazy Questions

• 22. You Call This a God?

• Appendix I: On Non-zero-sumness

• Appendix II: What Is Social Complexity?

Excerpt from

[SNIP]

Will the World Trade Organization ever go the way of the European Union? Will qualifying for membership someday entail more than low tariffs? Child-labor laws? Workplace-safety laws? Right-to-organize laws? And what about environmental law? Might adherence to global environmental treaties become part of staying a member in good standing of the WTO?

None of this is unthinkable, especially if the American left--and the left in other nations--make such changes a condition for accepting WTO amendments that big business supports. We may well someday see workers of the world truly uniting, like environmentalists of the world. The old political debates will continue--How to balance economic equality with efficiency?--but they will be mediated by supranational bodies of governance, whether regional or global.

Indeed, 1999 saw a glimmer of such a day during wrangling over who the next director of the World Trade Organization would be. As the New York Times noted, the United States--under a left-of-center government beholden to labor and environmental groups--favored the candidate more likely to "advocate environmental and labor issues." France did too, even though its farmers feared he would take a harsh view of agricultural subsidies. A European diplomat said of French politics: "This is a case where the labor forces who fear low-wage competition have won out over the agricultural interests."

Such interest-group struggles are nothing new. But they didn't use to involve bodies with names like "the World Trade Organization."

[SNIP]

An excerpt from Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, By Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Books. Copyright 2000 by Robert Wright. Other excerpts available at www.nonzero.org